This is just silly. Teach children how to cook with real food. Any child can scrape a bowl or add the ingredients you hand them. Any child can put coffee beans in a grinder. Afterwards, feel free to play with the aluminum bowls, metal pans and wooden spoons. But to buy an expensive and breakable Le Creuset dish for play? That has nothing to do with playing cook, and everything to do with a 'no expense is high enough' attitude of some parents.

What does it teach a child when you get them play cookware that's better than what a lot of people in this country buy from Wal-Mart? It teaches them they can't cook with anything that's not of a certain standard or brand. Use the old refrigerator box approach and let kids use their imagination and play without worrying about what brand they have or what people think of them. There's plenty of time for them to worry about that later in life. Then have them with you in the kitchen and help clean up so they aren't afraid to get their hands dirty cooking for real.

Having a set of miniature dishes for your dolls or other toys is one thing, but having a faux gourmet cooking station?. Can't the children "make do" with other things to IMAGINE? My memories are of building castles along with the story my little friend and I were making as we played in a sandbox, and ---making things out of sticks, coloring, cutting things out, arranging abstract items like blocks and boxes to create a magical world, covering chairs with blankets and crawling through them. Seems to me if children want to cook it's certainly the call to creativity. Let them in the real kitchen and then also let them dream.

We bought real (but small sized) cooking utensils for our kitchen. From the time my daughter was very young, my wife and I would cook with our daughter giving her jobs that she could do with the small bowls and utensils. My daughter is now nearly 30 and we still have (and use) the small stuff in our kitchen as it was not play cookware.We look forward to doing the same with grandchildren.Oh, by the way our daughter learned to cook this way as well as using her imagination with other kinds of play.

"Parent demand for healthier play foods has changed the objects found in children’s kitchens, manufactures say. Now toy makers have started to release items such as salad sets, sushi kits and grills featuring veggie burgers and rotisserie chickens."Um, how can you tell a plastic burger from a plastic veggie burger?

This kills me. Rich kids playing at being rich grown ups who probably don't spend much time in their rich granite and stainless steel kitchens.But do you know why us girls deeply loved our Easy Bake ovens and still fondly reminisce over them today?Because we could actually make something real!! By ourselves!!That's why we pulled our own kids out of our (atrocious) junior high and home schooled them for 3 years. Their test scores shot up as we taught them to cook, to write essays, to read deeply, to work alongside us. An unexpected benefit is that they stopped being influenced much by what their friends thought and gave them confidence that they could plan and manage their own lives.Now grown they both also cook from scratch and have the family pie crust memorized.

Whatever happened to an Easy Bake Oven and a Little Tikes kitchen? That's what my daughter used when she was little. I guess it's not good enough for these entitled parents and their children. This article is about like another article featured in the WSJ a month ago about the parents who have the $50,000 princess bedrooms put together for their kids; these people have more money than sense!

Only in America! Good for the manufacturers if these are appealing to some mechanical mindless idiots out there.In our case, our kids have been cooking and baking since the very beginning of their memories.